Whicker: Baseball lost its Most Valuable Person

June 16, 2014

Updated 9:00 p.m.

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Mourners place flowers at the base of a statue of baseball great Tony Gwynn at Petco Park Monday in San Diego. Gwynn died Monday morning after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 54. BILL WECHTER, BILL WECHTER GETTY IMAGES

Mourners place flowers at the base of a statue of baseball great Tony Gwynn at Petco Park Monday in San Diego. Gwynn died Monday morning after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 54. BILL WECHTER, BILL WECHTER GETTY IMAGES

LOS ANGELES – A fractious game found common ground Monday morning.

Tony Gwynn, dead at 54, represented the best of baseball to everyone.

We all love ordinary people who do extraordinary things. It makes us feel like we could do them, too, and it renews our faith in gravity, to see a maestro keep his feet on our ground.

Gwynn was an extreme case of both. He was a hitter of such sophistication that he bedeviled a Merlin like Greg Maddux, scalding him for a .415 average with no strikeouts in 107 at-bats.

Personally he was an open book, with large print.

He played in San Diego throughout his career when he could have doubled his salary several times if he had put himself on auction. When he and his wife Anita got a second home, they got it in Indianapolis.

He had appetites, and appetite-control problems. He also dipped tobacco, which he blamed for the origination of the cancer that he could never control.

Gwynn got taken to the cleaners by a slipshod agent, which could happen to us, and he angrily reacted when teammates Jack Clark and Garry Templeton called him selfish, as we would have.

Mostly, Gwynn was an inexhaustible donor of the one thing that none of us has in excess. Time.

Fans, writers, kids, mayors, clubhouse attendants, bus drivers, bellmen and CEOs all looked the same to Gwynn, human beings whom he wouldn’t have met if not for his gift for hitting baseballs. He treated them all with professional kindness.

He made hitting seem natural, too, and part of it was. But Gwynn put more hours into video study and pitcher research than anybody, and he mystified the smartest pitchers of his era.

Curt Schilling called him “the only guy I never tried to strike out.” Gwynn hit .390 against Schilling, .560 against Hideo Nomo, .474 against Dennis Eckersley, .400 against Bret Saberhagen, .444 against John Smoltz and Ron Darling, .321 against Orel Hershiser and Fernando Valenzuela, and .303 against Tom Glavine..

Overall he hit .338, with eight NL batting championships.

Tim Wallach was an opposing third baseman during many of those 20 years and is now a Dodgers’ coach.

“It was like he could hit the ball anywhere he wanted,” Wallach said. “You’ve heard of great hitters who can slow the game down. It was like he could slow the ball down. Pitchers would get to the point that they would just throw it down the middle. At least that would make him make a decision.”

“I didn’t see him much because I was in the other league,” manager Don Mattingly said, “but when I did see him, I thought, ‘Man, what a great swing.’”

Gwynn hit .345 against right-handers, .325 against left-handers, .343 at home, .334 on the road. In his worst month (July), he hit .325. In his best (August), he hit .348.

He struck out 434 times in his entire career, even though he believed in a “hitting zone” and not a strike zone. But he was more Punch than Judy. Gwynn had a career slugging percentage of .459. which is higher than Willie Horton’s and Carlton Fisk’s.

“He had that knack of keeping his hands back even when his body was committing itself forward,” recalled Bob Fontaine, the former Angels scouting director who drafted Gwynn in the third round for San Diego in 1982. “That’s how he could always slap those balls through the left side. He had incredible balance, but then he was a much better athlete than people thought. If he were coming up in this draft, he would go at least that high, maybe higher.”

Gwynn stole 40 bases one year, 56 another, and said his development into a reliable, sweet-throwing rightfielder made him prouder than anything.

Of course, he was probably the Clippers’ most successful draft pick ever. He was a pass-first point guard at San Diego State, and watched the Aztecs play baseball his freshman year.

Bobby Meacham, the Mater Dei infielder who played Connie Mack ball with Gwynn, recommended him to coach Jim Dietz.

“The best move I ever made,” Dietz said Monday, “was looking at his swing and deciding not to change a thing.”

Yet his career could have echoed louder. In 1994 he was 19 for 44 in August and was up to .394 when play stopped. There went a chance to .400, in a year when his OPS was 1.022.

His loyalty to the Padres wasn’t rewarded with consistent winning, although he hit .386 in leading the club to its only two World Series.

And when he went into the Hall of Fame in 2007, the headliner was Cal Ripken.

All that was fine. The plaque somehow bore all his numbers. They didn’t have one nearly big enough for his fingerprint.

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